eLife Changes Gear to Prioritise Preprints

On the 20th of October, eLife made the following announcement: “From next year, we will no longer make accept/reject decisions at the end of the peer-review process; rather, all papers that have been peer-reviewed will be published on the eLife website as Reviewed Preprints, accompanied by an eLife assessment and public reviews. The authors will also be able to include a response to the assessment and reviews. The decision on what to do next will then entirely be in the hands of the author; whether that’s to revise and resubmit, or to declare it as the final Version of Record.” So why is this happening, how will it work, and how will it shake up the dissemination of science, something that eLife prides itself on having done already? Speaking with Chris Smith, Damian Pattinson, eLife’s Executive Director…

达mian - Really what we're doing next puts pre-prints at the centre of research communication. Pre-Prints are something that we are extremely excited about. We see them as solving many of the problems that have really plagued research for, for many years. Most notably the issue of access in that they are fully available for anyone to read, and of speed in that they are immediately available. So, pre-prints have been really growing a great deal in volume over the last two years. And the pandemic, I think, really showed how important they were that that research could be shared immediately. So essentially all they are is an a, a version of a paper that is put online as soon as the author is ready to share it.

Chris - And why are you going down this road at all? Other places are doing this and you can be the beneficiary of it. So why do you need to go down this road?

达mian - It's more that we are sort of following a route that we are seeing the world go down, which is that, you know, if pre-prints do become the norm - and we do strongly hope that they do - then the whole publishing model needs to change because essentially they are published at that point. You are putting work online and therefore the publication process has already happened. So then the role of the publisher changes dramatically in that world. So in a preprint world, the, the question that the readers want to know is is this paper correct? And is it worth my time to read it? And so that's what our new model is seeking to address. We'll continue to perform our expert consultative peer review process that we've been developing over the last 10 years, and that will help us answer the question of whether this paper is correct. But then we're also sort of changing the bit around answering the question of whether someone should read it. So at the moment, that question is really answered by the venue that the paper is published in. So if it's an eLife paper, you can assume that it's going to be quite interesting and it's going to be maybe a sort of broader audience piece. So our model replaces the title of the journal with something much more nuanced and much more detailed. So we have these, what we're calling eLife assessments, and essentially they are short summary of the peer reviews, and they indicate both the significance of the findings and also the quality of the methods. And we think it will really reduce the wastefulness that happens in the peer review process at the moment where great reviews are often just discarded if a paper gets rejected by a journal. And this whole notion of a sort of accepted or rejected in a journal, which really doesn't work in a, in a pre-print world, is replaced with something much more nuanced and, and hopefully useful.

Chris - You're really redefining what pre-print means though, aren't you? Because at the moment, pre-print means I put something somewhere in a sort of what I think is vaguely completed form while a journal like eLife considers it. You're saying actually what we now call a pre-print is just the beginning of the scientific publishing journey, where there has been some value added by experts looking at it, providing peer oversight of that piece of work, and it can then subsequently be considered or, or adapted, adjusted in a dynamic way going forward. But that is the research as it stands at that point in time with you adding a star rating almost in terms of whether someone should trust it.

达mian - Yeah, that's broadly right. I mean, you know, in this system you start with what the scientist puts out there as their best attempt at explaining what they've done, and then we then enhance that. So the process does become much more dynamic. You know, the peer review process is then there to make corrections, to make suggestions for changes if necessary, and alert people to the importance of that work and the sort of significance of it. So in a world where the author is in control, and essentially that's what we're talking about here, the author is now the one who decides when they're ready to post, they're ready to, you know, what changes they want to make or, or, or anything. Then the role of the publisher does become one around making recommendations and suggesting to their readers that this is something that maybe of interest to them. So it's an extremely different world that we are envisaging here.

Chris - Does this get round one of the problems that people have traditionally said is an issue with peer review, which is that if a particular person is a bit unpopular in the field, or, or they're coming at the field from a direction where it's not aligned with the dogmatic view of how that field works, that they've traditionally found it very hard to publish. Whereas if you can do this, then you can get the community behind it rather than just a small pool of, of reviewers who might give you negative reviews.

达mian - It's interesting. That's, that's not a way I'd thought about it before. But yeah, I think certainly there is something much more kind of leveling about preprints. You know, anyone can post one there. I mean, there are checks that preprint servers do their own checks, but broadly, you know, if you are posting something that is, you know, robustly reasonable, then it will get posted online. And so all of a sudden you have this incredibly sort of equitable system where the journals then come in and provide review in a world where everything is already out there. So yeah, it does, I think certainly improve the kind of equitability of the system.

Chris - How about the reaction from the supporters, the scientists that are sending you their manuscripts and people who, who now highly value eLife and regard as one of the world's leading science journals? How's this going down with them?

达mian - I mean, the reaction has been amazing. When we announced a couple of weeks ago Twitter really set a light and we had more engagement than I think we've ever had on social media and beyond in our entire existence. So it has been extraordinary, and I think that's what sort of 10 years of, of, of building e Life has allowed us to do. The reaction has been incredibly mixed. I think some people see this as a complete game changer and a genuine alternative to the current journal system. Others are more cautious and they are waiting to see how it will play out, what these reviews, these new reviewed pre-print will look like how we will handle these sorts of workflows and things. And there's obviously apprehension from people who feel that this is too different, it's too dramatic and radical, and that's all fine. I mean, that's exactly what we're expecting. But overall, there was a clear feeling from Twitter at least, that this is a sort of revolutionary change and people did really understand the scale of it. So from that point of view, I think it's really successful and extremely exciting.

Chris - I wonder what Elon Musk will have to say about it, now he owns Twitter one's always very cautious about what the Twitter sphere says, cuz we know that can go in either direction. What's the business model? How much does this cost? And who pays what?

达mian - So the business model is changing as well. Obviously, in a world where we are posting these reviewed preprints for everything we review, then it doesn't make sense to to only charge a subset of the authors. So the, the previous system, we were only charging publication fees to accepted authors. And obviously now that we're moving away from a kind of binary accept, reject decision, we are changing our model so that we would then charge a publication free to everyone who we post a review preprint for. So essentially every paper that we send for review, we will then charge the author for for the, the work that we do to to review and to to post the reviewed pre-prints.

Chris - Does that - sorry to interrupt -does that include everyone everywhere? Because one of the other attractions of eLife in the past is that some countries, and for instance, our colleagues in Africa who've published an amazing sequence of palaeo papers in eLife did so because they wanted to make sure that other poorer African countries could still access effectively heritage data that would otherwise be snatched away and put behind a firewall with some of the other publishers.

达mian - So yes, we are still continuing with our waiver policy, which we, which we've always had, which is essentially to say that if you can't afford to pay for a publication fee, then we won't ask for one. We'll continue to do that. The other thing I just wanted to say was, because we're obviously charging authors we send for review, that means that there are more authors to charge and it means that we can reduce our fee to any one author. So it used to be $3,000 and with this new model it will be $2,000. So it's a dramatic saving for any individual author.

Chris -
And parting thoughts on what you want to do next?

达mian - I think this is going to take some time for people to really understand and to get behind. So I think the next few years for us will be around learning how things change, what, what we need to do differently, and, you know, to continue to kind of support all our authors and readers to make sure that this, this system still works and gives them everything they need. So I think we're going to be very busy with that. But I think what we have now is a kind of clear direction of travel. It's been amazing to finally announce this work so that we can really sort of start engaging with the community on how it really works in practice. So so that's going to be all of our work for the next few years.